Bobby on the Beat: Tales from the Streets of London

Objective

I hope participants at this session will get a glimpse into a very different place and way of life from the one that most of us are used to, and go away having been entertained, but also with an insight and empathy for the people leading those lives.

Description

An old TV show ended with the line: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them".

This session is the story of my involvement in a few of those stories as a police officer in London, and a journey into peoples' lives in their moments of crisis, from love and loss, to missing children, drugs, violence and the London riots of August 2011.

I will talk about my experiences policing East London in 2011-12 and what I learned about the city, my colleagues and about myself.

Requirements

Only curiosity about a different way of life and the people who help others in their most difficult and vulnerable moments.

Speaker bio

I'm a lawyer from the National Law School in Bangalore, and I started a company called Law School Tutorials in law school (and sold it a few years later).

I then moved to London (via San Francisco where I spent a few months working at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on free speech and copyright law issues) where I studied and worked for years as a lawyer and later as a police officer in the Metropolitan Police Service.

I came back to India in 2012 and now practice law in the Madras High Court.